1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system, and in particular to a computer implemented method, data processing system and computer program product for discovering and managing log data.
2. Description of the Related Art
During problem determination in a distributed environment at the application level, or the operating system level, there is often a requirement to examine information logged in application or operating system specific log files. A difficulty many users typically face involves identifying the exact location of the log files required for problem analysis.
Typically, tools in the industry are available for discovering physical resources and installed applications, but not for the discovery of log file locations. Some tools analyze details of application executables and other application footprint information mainly for inventory purposes but cannot be used for problem determination.
With the tools available today, performing problem analysis in a distributed environment using application or system log files typically presents a number of challenges to users. Users may need to know the locations of all the log files of all the applications running on each machine in the network in order to identify a problem. Users also may require access to all machines within the network and manually retrieve the log files across the network for analysis. Alternatively, tools may be used that require installation of agents on all machines on a network. Some known techniques may require applications on a remote host to instantiate debug objects, and track any kind of error, trace or debug information generated by that application. Additionally, users may need to know specific details about the log file, such as location, version, encoding, locale, application install directory, and other relevant information to obtain and analyze the log file data. These and other factors increase the time required to identify a problem, and increases the need for system administrators to know detailed application information of installed products in a distributed network.
Current solutions include systems for managing log files through files defined in a configuration file, and copying physical log files using an archiving utility where the log files may be merged into a single log file or may be maintained in a central repository. Solutions such as these are typically limited in scope to a single personal computer and are therefore not scalable for large distributed networks. Copying all physical log files in each system on a distributed network to a single repository places extra load on network traffic, and may result in an extremely large and difficult to manage repository. Typical solutions may also be limited in terms of types of log files that can be archived or managed since the solution requires prior knowledge of log file types to be provided in a configuration file.